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OFFSET YOUR CARBON
EMISSIONS WITH NATIONAL PARK RANGERS

A carbon
offset credit is a service that tries to reduce the net
carbon emissions of
people or organizations by compensating their carbon emissions with measures for
absorbing greenhouse* gases. A wide variety of offset actions are available;
forest planting is the most common. Also popular are credits from renewable energy and energy conservation,
as well as greenhouse emissions trading.

The intended goal of
carbon offset credits is to combat global warming. The appeal
of becoming "carbon neutral" has contributed to the growth of
voluntary
offsets, which often are more cost-effective alternatives to reducing
one's own fossil-fuel consumption.

We were planning to make a
carbon-offset calculator that would allow you to calculate different components of your ecological
footprint so that it would calculate with how many "ranger days" you
can offset your carbon dioxide footprint by preventing forests from going
up in flames. Those are nice internet toys, but unfortunately, the real
world does not quite work as simple as that. Let's take a look, and decide then
what you should do.

The costs of Carbon
Offset from Carbon emission avoidance through forest protection

Assume a tropical forest has about 175
metric tons of Carbon in its trees. The carbon is fixed in the tree trunks,
leaves and roots. Did you realize that actually lots of carbon is underground in
the roots? So, if a hectare of forest gets deforested, the wood may first be
used to build houses, furniture or produce paper, but eventually, it will either
rot away or be burned. The branches and leaves will often be burned or left in
the field to rot away. The roots in the ground will decay by fungi and bacteria,
and eventually all the carbon of that forest will be converted into CO2. The
mass of CO2 is more than 3
times more than that of Carbon, so the 175 tons of carbon will
produce more that 500 tons of CO2.

We are often asked how much it
costs to protect a hectare of natural forest. The answer is: that depends on the size
and the location. It costs many times more per ha to protect a few hundreds of
ha of natural forest, than to protect a million of ha. The difference may be as much as more than
100,000 more expensive per ha for an area less than 2 ha as for an area larger
that 1,000,000. So it is impossible to give a general answer. So, lets assume that we work with an
area of 10,000 ha. We like to use the size of an area of 10,000 ha, because it
is the same kind of size of many new forest plantations planted for carbon
fixation (or sequestration).

In Brazil, the estimated costs of
protecting a 10,000 ha natural forests are about $185,000 per year, including staffing, and all operational costs, such as
fuel for vehicles, write of of buildings and equipment, etc. $185,000 would thus
avoid the emission of 500,000 tons of CO2 into the air.

So, protecting a hectare of natural forest
would be about $18.5 per ha per year. $18.5 dollars per year would prevent 175
metric tons of Carbon become 500 tons of CO2. That is less than $0.04 per metric
ton of carbon. You read it well: it takes less than 4 dollar cents per year to
avoid 1 ton of CO2 to be released into the air as greenhouse gas.

As a comparison, the
Carbon fixation through a variety of mechanisms, such as planting new forests, is
sold from $4,00 - $25 per ton of CO2. But those calculations are made for
planting and maintaining a new plantation for the duration of 1 forest cycle
about 20 - 30 years. They don't take into account what happens afterward, so
they don't set up an endowment fund to keep the area under forest cover
forever.

Now, we only believe in durable avoidance
of the emission of CO2, if the emission avoidance of carbon dioxide
is really permanent. So in our opinion, you can only permanently avoid the emission of CO2
into the air, if you set up an endowment fund that
would generate the capital interest from which management costs can be financed permanently. Assuming a 7% return from the endowment fund, it would take about
$2,700,000 to prevent 500,000 tons of CO2 to be released into the air, which is
about $5 per ton. That is about as much as for the short-term fixation of Carbon
through forest plantations, whereas Carbon
dioxide emission avoidance
through and Adopt-A-Ranger-Endowment fund would be permanent!

An average American household releases
about 15
tons of CO2 into the air. So to compensate that release forever, it would
cost a household about $75 per year to permanently offset its carbon
dioxide emission in a natural forest.

Assuming that you would
participate in an endowment fund that pays for ALL the costs of an area with natural
forests,
so that it will be protected forever! But what is even more important, your
carbon offset would help the survival of literally thousands of species of
plants and animals.

Heaving read all this, do you still
want to invest your greenhouse gas emission compensation in the plantation of monocultures?
Or would you prefer to participate in a Carbon
Dioxide emission avoidance
programme? Invest it with us, and we will invest your money in an endowment fund that pays
for the EFFECTIVE protection of thousands of hectares of natural forests!

Now, we have used some very coarse data. There are
great variations in the amounts of Carbon per ha. Some natural forests have more, others
have less. In reality, most areas that we will be working with, are far bigger
than 10,000 ha and therefore the protection costs per ha are much lower. So in
reality your carbon emission avoidance contribution will be many times more beneficial than
a carbon offset through the planting of a new forest.